The angel investor network formed in association with Slow Money NYC is changing its name to “Foodshed Investors NY” (formerly known as “NYC LION”).

We make this name change to better express the specific focus of our investment interests and the type of food companies that we would like to attract to work with us.

We are investing in the Foodshed. So now: form follows function.

Our INVESTMENT CRITERIA remains the same. We are interested in funding food and farm businesses that are SUSTAINABLE, SMALL and LOCAL.

What is a “foodshed”?

Though it may be unfamiliar, the term “foodshed” was used almost 80 years ago in a book entitled How Great Cities Are Fed (Hedden, 1929) to describe the flow of food from producer to consumer.

Seven decades later, the term was used to describe a food system that connected local producers with local consumers (Kloppenburg et al., 1996).

In this project, the general definition of a foodshed is a geographic area that supplies a population center, like NYC, with food. — (Local Food Mapping Project, Cornell University).

NYC receives food from all over the world. So, NYC’s “foodshed” is, in a sense, global. However, NYC has only three days of non-perishable food per person on hand at any given time. (Red Cross Preparedness Report 2013). And we seek to make investments that increase local capacity to produce more food, improving the resilience of the region that includes NYC as its largest marketplace for the sale of food.

With this goal in mind, we face the challenge of defining “local.” For us, a “local” food business is able to travel to NYC markets within a business day and sells its goods or services there.